IMB Annual Report

Southern Baptist churches, working with their International Mission Board (IMB), are seeing amazing progress toward meeting the challenge of global missions. They continue to press toward a goal of seeing all unreached people groups with a population of at least 100,000 engaged with the Gospel by the end of 2008. Another vital goal is that all unreached people groups will have access to the Gospel by the end of 2010. Southern Baptist churches can be involved in meeting this goal.

Recently, International Mission Board missionaries reported that they implemented a church-planting strategy among more than 1,100 people groups, including 100 people groups newly engaged. However, thousands of unreached people groups still are not engaged by the IMB or its partners. For them to have the opportunity to hear the Gospel, IMB leaders have challenged Southern Baptists to add more missionaries to the current total of 5,271 to help meet the challenge.

To achieve evangelistic advance worldwide, IMB missionaries and their overseas Baptist partners reported more than 25,000 new churches and baptisms topping 600,000 for the first time. Affiliated church membership reached a total of nearly 9.9 million believers.

To help keep pace with the numbers of church members coming forward for overseas service, Southern Baptists responded generously. They gave $150.4 million to the 2007 Lottie Moon Christmas Offering® – more than $231,000 above the record 2006 offering of $150.1 million. The number of field personnel appointed in 2007 was 844. Of that total, the number of long-term workers appointed, which included 15 reappointees, was 339. At the end of 2007, the total number of missionaries serving through the IMB was 5,271.

The IMB continues to expand the ways it serves Southern Baptist churches and partners as they fulfill the Great Commission. Personalized relationships between churches, partners, overseas personnel and people groups are being facilitated, and the board is providing churches with coaching and resources that allow them to be strategically involved.

Southern Baptists also responded to hunger and relief needs through 334 projects. Project examples included assistance to the elderly in Central and Eastern Europe, emergency food for entire communities in South Asia due to unexpected and extreme cold, assistance to hurricane victims in the Middle America and Caribbean region, and ministries to refugees and internally displaced persons throughout Europe and the Middle East. More than $7.8 million was appropriated for these projects and more than $1.2 million of that total was used for tsunami-related projects.

God has called His people to proclaim His name among all peoples. Yet, as of January 2008, a total of 5,916 people groups live in The Last Frontier. That’s nearly 1.6 billion people who have little or no access to the Gospel.

God is using Southern Baptists, however, to carry the light of Jesus to people groups in spiritual darkness around the globe. Your gifts to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering and the Cooperative Program help willing servants to go tell the story of Jesus.

The International Mission Board is a Southern Baptist Convention entity supported by the Cooperative Program and the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.

Lottie Moon Christmas Offering® is a registered trademark of Woman’s Missionary Union.